Mentoring a Third Year Student Nurse

For this assignment I will address Morton- Cooper & Palmer (2005) enabling traits and discussed the core skill of a mentor. I will analyse and reflect on how I’ve utilised these skill with a third year student nurse in my practice area (cardiology) I will also reflect and evaluate my mentoring experience with my learner to see if there is any area of improvement or changes to be amended.

The Department for Health (2001) defined a mentor as an individual who facilitates learning and supervises and assesses students in the practice setting.

As mentors, they make time for there students, checked student performance, set boundaries for the shift, knew what students were learning, explain what they were doing, asked questions and challenged students and acted as positive role models.

In summary an effective mentor is someone who has a particular view of the nature of human beings and how they should be treated, has certain personal attributes, up-to-date knowledge and skills related to their professional practice and a genuine desire to give time and energy to the role of mentor. This is important as its helps in building student’s confident and also be able to work in friendly environment.

Morton- Cooper & Palmer (2005) has identified three characteristics /Enabling Traits of an effective mentor which would be analysed in the essay. This involved Competence, Confidence, and Commitment.

As a mentor I have to prepare myself prior to meeting my student needs. My manager gave me details of my student including the year and duration on the ward. With this information, I prepared my shift rota to fit in with my student for the first week. I met with my student for the first time and introduced myself to her as her mentor. I ...

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...n important role in developing nursing students’ learning. The interaction with patients and their families during this experience helps nursing students to develop technical, psychomotor, interpersonal and communication skills (Banning et al 2006).

In conclusion, mentoring is an important and effective adult learning strategy. There is a need to recognize that once one take on the role of mentor, there will be need to be equip with relevant educational training and with up to date knowledge.

Being a mentor has given me the opportunity to develop learning skills in my clinical practice that will contribute to students learning in the future.

It is ideal for mentor and student to link prior to starting the placement. The reflection process has given me skills to reflect, address strengths, weakness and the opportunity to address issues within practice area.